Apple’s New iPads Are Useless If You Already Own An iPhone

Apple deserves some credit; the bulk of their presentation today was for power users. People who buy MacBook Pros or desperately want a Mac Pro got the most love. The majority of their customers, though, got Apple’s bottomless contempt and disgust with a set of iPads that show the company knows it doesn’t have to try anymore.

The iPads OR The Stuff You Actually Care About

Apple spent a very long hour detailing stuff most people aren’t interested in before getting to the iPads. Apple opened the presentation essentially by gloating about their competitors not doing as well, that iPads have lots of apps for them, and hooray iPad! If you get the distinct sense that Apple didn’t really have anything substantial to say about iPads, why, correct you are! In fact, if you happen to own an iPhone, let me save you a few hundred dollars; it’s just the iPhone 5S with a bigger screen.

First of all, the ten-inch iPad is now called the iPad Air, because it’s 20% thinner than the last one, and that’s also good branding. Oh, and it also weighs a pound. Which is, undeniably, impressive. But that’s about it. It’s essentially an iPhone 5S writ large; it even has the same processor. Undeniably that’s a bump up from the A6X, but there is no reason, whatsoever, to buy this if you already have an iPhone 5S. In fact, there’s not really a good reason to buy this, period.

Oh, and there’s no price-drop, either. It starts at $500, and if you want LTE service, you will essentially be paying iPhone 5S money for an iPhone 5S that can’t make calls. Oh, and the iPad 2 is still $400, because Apple thinks you’re a chump. The iPad Air ships November 1st.

The iPad Mini, meanwhile, has also been completely redesigned…to rip you off. The first one was always a stopgap; hence the lack of a Retina screen, which has now been dealt with. It too gets an A7 chip, and starts at $400 for a 16GB version. But you can get the old one, for “just” $300 now! Want an LTE version? That’ll be $530. Or, again, you could just buy an iPhone 5S unlocked for $650.

It’s jaw-dropping just how contemptuous this is. It’s impossible to emphasize how useless this round of iPads are. Apple’s resting hard on their laurels, here, and that’s a bad thing to see.

Need a tablet? Buy a Nexus 7. Need a cutting edge smartphone? Buy an iPhone 5S. The one thing you do not need, and will never need, are these iPads.

MacBook Pros

Essentially, Apple’s flagship laptop got a nice refresh. The thirteen-incher you see in so many college dorms gets a 2.4 GHz Core i5 processor, 4 GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD, and it’s shipping today, for cheap: Just $1300, putting it more in line with high-end laptops at that screen size. The fifteen-incher, meanwhile, gets a quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, and it loses $200 off its price as well. In short, if you want a laptop that runs OSX, you can now get a really, really nice one with a Thunderbolt port.

Mac Pro

Apple’s workhorse currently starts at $3000 and you undeniably get a lot for your money: Basically higher-end versions of this can support three 4K displays. I’d get into the specs, but really, there’s just one you need to know: This ships with dual GPU workstations standard, and you can get it with up to twelve cores. This is a deeply specialized machine designed for hardcore professional video editors, computer graphics work, and other industrial applications. Also, it still looks like a trash can.

Software

OSX Mavericks is free, and basically helps your computer operate more efficiently; for example, it compresses data in the RAM to get more performance out of it. iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand have all gotten user-friendly makeovers: GarageBand, for example, can now have twelve tracks and uses the cloud to let you work on songs between your Mac devices. And a lot of this stuff is now free, or so cheap that it might as well be free.

Apple spent a lot of time on this. To give you an idea of how much, they spent some time creating an “album cover” for one of their executives. Seriously. Yes, it was cringe-inducing.

In Summary…

Apple’s actual computers are cheaper and cooler, and the Mac Pro looks amazing under the hood if goofy on the outside. And this is because Apple thinks it can sucker its customers. But, hey, shiny new Mac Pro!

The iPad differentiated itself from the iPhone by being a related, but separate product; different processor, it filled different needs, etc. This brings the two a little too close together, especially in terms of pricing and what you get for the money. I’d actually argue this is the most similar the two lines have ever been to each other, and that’s bad.

The iPad never really used a different processor, it may have had a new processor before the iPhone but you could always predict the next processor. iPad 2 had the iPhone 4s processor. iPad 3 had a slightly better 4s processor, iPad 4 had the A6 a few months before the iPhone 5.

But your point of contention is that if people have an iPhone 5S, this is a pointless purchase. You realize they are two completely different things, right?

I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about another phone. The tablet market and the phone market are not the same thing. Why buy ANY tablet if you already have a smartphone? No tablets (regardless of brand or OS) innovate much year to year. This is not some shocking surprise or new thing.

For the sake of not seeming like an Apple shill, I will note that I switched to a Galaxy Note 2 from my 4S last year, and got rid of my iPad 2 for a new model Nexus 7 this summer. And I don’t really think these are anything special — as with most Apple products, you’re mainly paying for the build quality, the brand, and the OS stability. I wouldn’t switch back to an iPad from my Nexus 7 (I love it)…

However, at the end of the day, the new iPads are an improvement over the old ones, and are not more expensive. I really don’t see the problem.

1300 is now cheap for a laptop with an i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD? Strange, I can get one for almost half that by not being an Apple fanboy and paying twice as much for the logo on the back. People that pay twice as much for a machine that does the same exact things as the cheaper alternative are the reason that Apple can’t be bothered to actually innovate anymore, why bother?

I buy Apple products because I like paying for something that works perfectly, never crashes, rarely gets viruses, has a brilliant operating system that is easy to use, comes with free iLife software that is at least 5 years ahead of whatever microsoft is selling, and all Apple products just work together smoothly. Yes I could buy a windows pc for half the price, but why bother.

I have to disagree. The main purpose most people use a tablet for is to either read or watch things and while that can be done on your iPhone it also can cause a lot of eye strain, reading on a larger screen is much more appealing. I’ve been wanting to get one for a while with the main purpose being to watch my itunes library and comics/graphic novels. I have a Nook (my parents got me one a couple of years ago for Christmas when I moved Europe because bless their heart) and can testify that you want a normal size tablet for the latter (also, the Nook prices are a huge rip-off when compared to the Kindle or Comixology). My girlfriend has an iPad 4 and while she loves it the one thing she complains about is that sometimes it starts to feel heavy when you hold it for a long time. If you haven’t got one yet or been waiting for an upgrade from a 1 or 2 this sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Tried to install Mavericks the other day, turns out I’ve got the wrong partition scheme and would need to reformat my entire hard drive and re-do my bootcamp and everything. Shitty. I’m fine with the iPad stuff, though; as much as I ever was, anyway. The new Mac Pro looks pretty dope, but I hate that it’s becoming less customizable/upgradeable. I kinda thought that was the whole point of the Mac Pro, but I guess Apple has gotten the message that there are a lot of people out there who will pay top dollar to get the newest versions of their products on an annual basis, so they might as well provide those people with yet another disposal service for their ugly, morally reprehensible, uncomfortable-to-have-in-your-pocket-so-you-better-spend-them-fast dollars.